The sheer impact of our ‘Paper Drive’ at the Chemical Engineering Department (Nirma University) has been stupendous! The city of Ahmedabad has been very generous in supporting our endeavour to save trees when our efforts were documented on the frontpage of ‘Ahmedabad Mirror’ (a daily from The Times of India group).

The focus of our campaign towards waste paper is simple: Reusing papers in all forms possible. Usually, corporates and academia paper work is a one-side printout of A4 size. Imagine the sheer magnitude of blank space wasted on the pages which ultimately end up in the waste bin or the basement from where it is sold in bulk to the kabaadiwala!

So, we thought why not collect them and create one-sided 100 page notebooks and distribute them amongst the needy students? This small yet novel idea gripped all our Chemical Engineering students, especially the freshmen/first years, and we began searching for places where we could begin with. First stop: Our own department!

About 40000+ pages were obtained from our department only! Dividing this with the figure of 100, we get 400 notebooks! ‘Ahmedabad Mirror’ recognized our endeavour by giving it a front page treatment. In addition, we were also able to make this movement known to the whole city of Ahmedabad and opened collection centres across, including the Times of India office on Ashram Road.

The people of Ahmedabad thronged to deposit whatever waste paper they had and on day One post-publication, we got a deposit of around 5000+ pages. This figure has escalated and we hope to make this campaign a grand success by extending it to our Institute and other institutes/firms.

In addition, we are holding a Painting Competition in different municipal schools across Ahmedabad and the one adjudged best will be the cover page of our notebooks. No better way to acknowledge the inherent talent in children than giving their art the recognition it deserves, in our case, the front page of notebooks to be seen by all.

We hope to make a small difference in this big world in our own way. And also tell the world, that efforts, big or small, don’t go unwarranted. Instead, as in our case, it caters momentum like a ball of snow going down the mountain gathering more snow and then finally taking the shape of a huge revolution that can change the world.